Basil Street Blues: A Memoir

Biography & Memoir
Cover of the book Basil Street Blues: A Memoir by Michael Holroyd, W. W. Norton & Company
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Author: Michael Holroyd ISBN: 9780393343137
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company Publication: October 10, 2011
Imprint: W. W. Norton & Company Language: English
Author: Michael Holroyd
ISBN: 9780393343137
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Publication: October 10, 2011
Imprint: W. W. Norton & Company
Language: English

"A wonderful offbeat memoir.... Holroyd has written perhaps his best book yet."—Ben Macintyre, New York Times Book Review

Renowned biographer Michael Holroyd had always assumed that his own family was perfectly English, or at least perfectly ordinary. But an investigation into the Holroyd past—guided by old photograph albums, crumbling documents, and his parents' wildly divergent accounts of their lives—gradually yields clues to a constellation of startling events and eccentric characters: a slow decline from English nobility on one side, a dramatic Scandinavian ancestry on the other. Fires, suicides, bankruptcies, divorces, unconsummated longings, and the rumor of an Indian tea fortune permeate this wry, candid memoir, "part multiple biography, part autobiography, but principally an oblique investigation of the biographer's art" (New York Times Book Review). "[A] perfect example of a memoir that entrances me."—Katherine A. Powers, Boston Sunday Globe "[O]ne of the few [biographers] who can convey what makes ordinary as well as extraordinary mortals live in our minds."—Los Angeles Times

View on Amazon View on AbeBooks View on Kobo View on B.Depository View on eBay View on Walmart

"A wonderful offbeat memoir.... Holroyd has written perhaps his best book yet."—Ben Macintyre, New York Times Book Review

Renowned biographer Michael Holroyd had always assumed that his own family was perfectly English, or at least perfectly ordinary. But an investigation into the Holroyd past—guided by old photograph albums, crumbling documents, and his parents' wildly divergent accounts of their lives—gradually yields clues to a constellation of startling events and eccentric characters: a slow decline from English nobility on one side, a dramatic Scandinavian ancestry on the other. Fires, suicides, bankruptcies, divorces, unconsummated longings, and the rumor of an Indian tea fortune permeate this wry, candid memoir, "part multiple biography, part autobiography, but principally an oblique investigation of the biographer's art" (New York Times Book Review). "[A] perfect example of a memoir that entrances me."—Katherine A. Powers, Boston Sunday Globe "[O]ne of the few [biographers] who can convey what makes ordinary as well as extraordinary mortals live in our minds."—Los Angeles Times

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